A web content publishing process can involve many different activities including content creation, content editing, copyediting, content retirement, and release management across many different types of content.
Release management can be complex and time-consuming activity. In a conventional release management environment, releasing content to a platform includes significant involvement of many individual contributors.
Individual content contributors can come from many different backgrounds. For instance, some contributors may belong to an engineering team, whereas other contributors may be part of a marketing team, while still other contributors may be part of other teams that generate content. As part of the process of releasing new content, the platform might have to be re-written to incorporate the new content, e.g., overwriting various database tables and blob stores with a completely new version of the platform. This can cause design challenges that lead to errors and/or inconsistencies that might only be avoided through excessive coordination between many types of teams.
In addition, various decisions and coordination need to occur during this highly complex release management process. For example, a conventional release management process can require a significant amount of supervision and approval by one or more release managers who are tasked with deciding which content items are integrated into a specific version of a release. To explain further, a release manager is responsible for planning many different releases, and has control over the content items or objects that will be included in and published as part of a specific release. This involves a time-consuming set of tasks. For instance, a release manager has to decide the metadata tagging for filtering content (e.g. role, product, skill), determine the content that should be added or removed or retired, determine pointers to multiple version control systems and repositories or branches where the content is mastered, and resolve other issues on a detailed content basis. These are just some of the challenges faced in a release management process.
Consequently, employee resources can be wasted because of the inefficient allocation of employee time needed to ensure a new release from a content deployment system.